Cool Coincidence of the Day--Or Not?

Shelf Awareness

Today is pub date for The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Little, Brown), whose title refers to a 1654 painting by Dutch artist Carel Fabritius that, at the beginning of the book, is on loan to the Metropolitian Museum of Art--and is taken by the narrator when a terrorist bomb explodes in the museum, killing his mother.

Strikingly, The Goldfinch, which usually hangs in the Hague's Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis (currently closed for renovation), is part of an exhibition featuring Dutch masters that opens today at the Frick Collection in New York City. A Frick spokeswoman told the New York Times that exhibition was planned "without knowledge of Ms. Tartt's book."